'Zeke the Bleak' at His Putrid Peak

On Sunday, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel appeared on Chris Wallace's Fox News show to defend the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.

Though I expected Emanuel, described by Wallace as one of the law's "architects," to administer unhealthy doses of contempt for anyone who believes in freer markets, individual autonomy, and the truth, I didn't expect him to morph into the obnoxious person who may be Obamacare opponents' best recruiting tool. The best strategy for conservatives and libertarians seeking to more quickly build opposition to Obamacare, which has grown significantly in the 40 days Americans have been able to experience some of what's really in it, may be to widely distribute the video of Emanuel's offensive Fox performance and root for the doctor to continue to do weekly rounds with Wallace.

The Fox host identified Emanuel as one of Obamacare's "architects." For those who weren't closely tuned in four years ago when Congress first began "considering" Obamacare — i.e., concocting thousands of pages of continually revised dense verbiage which no one read, let alone fully understood — Zeke Emanuel is also Dr. "Death Panels."

It appears that Emanuel and his peeps have been furiously at work cleaning up his public persona in the four years since I called him "Zeke the Bleak" in a PJ Media column. With the exception of a feel-good book about growing up with his brother, former Obama chief of staff and now Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Zeke has until very recently been largely out of the public eye. Despite that, his Wikipedia entry now weighs in at well over 7,000 words, up from fewer than 2,000 in August 2009. A great deal of the additional Wiki verbiage attempts to convey the impression that Zeke really isn't an advocate of life-threatening or life-shortening rationing regimes, and that his primary interest is reducing what he sees as the chronic "overutilization" of medical services in this country.